Two Reviews: A One-Woman Susan Sontag Show and the Gob Squad’s “Super Night Shot”

The real hero of New York’s January cultural scene is the genial theatre producer Mark Russell. For eight years now, he’s put together a bit of inspired madness called the Under the Radar Festival, which runs from January 4th through January 15th, and brings together a number of theatre artists from around the world whose stage visions are like no other. Under the aegis of the Public Theatre, and its director, Oskar Eustis, Russell treats audiences and performers as they dash from one event to another, or one stage to another, with the affable calm of a host who knows what has gone wrong, or can go wrong, but who also knows it’ll all be O.K. in the end.

Prior to his tenure at the Public, Russell was the Executive Director of P.S. 122, one of New York’s more vibrant performance and gallery spaces, whose warped linoleum floors and many-coats-of-paint-on-the-wall, funky but institutional atmosphere has meant so much to so many, including a fabulous range of performers and writers and musicians such as Dancenoise, Thomas Bradshaw, David Linton, Ishmael Houston-Jones, John Cale, and Carmelita Tropicana. During his time at P.S. 122, Russell helped showcase and support a particular style of performance: one that was politically based, confrontational, but anchored in the poetics of the theatre, too.

Russell’s artists generally ignored the dreary conventions of the proscenium arch, and the plot-resolution structure that inhibits a number of theatrical events, because they could: they were well-schooled in tradition. In any case, the point was to make it new. At Under the Radar, Russell’s ever-present questions—What constitutes theatre? What makes something political?—are on display in any number of the pieces he curated for the event. I’ve seen a few performances so far, but the Builders Association’s “Sontag: Reborn,” a one-woman show based on Susan Sontag’s early journals, and the Gob Squad Arts Collective’s “Super Night Shot” are more memorable than most for a number of reasons.

Watching Moe Angelos’s solo performance in “Sontag: Reborn,” I was reminded of a conversation that the late director Sidney Lumet had with his star, Faye Dunaway, when they were shooting “Network.” In the film, Dunaway played Diana Christensen, a TV exec without a soul. Lumet warned her against playing the part as anything else. If you try to sneak any vulnerability in, I’ll cut it out, he said.

I don’t mean to suggest that Angelos’s portrayal of America’s most recognizable public intellectual is without vulnerability, particularly toward the end of the ninety-minute work, but she doesn’t like being vulnerable much, and when she does sneak it in it feels as though she were doing so for her audience: we should like Sontag as much as we admired her, or, rather, as much as we were intrigued by her particular brand of fame. But how can we, given that Angelos’s portrayal doesn’t include anything remotely resembling emotional development? (Where’s all the anguish she felt leaving her young son, David, behind in America to pursue her studies at Oxford?) Sontag reads, she suffers, she talks, talks, talks, as a video image of the “old” Sontag—she of the famous coiffure, white stripe somewhere near the middle—looks down at her younger self, sometimes offering wry comments in between drags on her ever-present cigarette. “Old” Susan is the “top” to her younger self’s “bottom.”

Was Sontag as humorless as Angelos and the director, Marianne Weems, make her seem? With her tight lips, and tight body, Angelos seems to be channelling Hope Emerson in prison dramas like “Caged,” where the actress played a caricature of a “dyke” prison matron, a character Sontag might have relegated to the “canon of camp.” I suppose Angelos and Weems thought there’s only one way to play a lesbian, even as she tries to circumvent her own queerness.

The Gob Squad’s “Super Night Shot” was a different experience altogether. On the evening I saw the show, we were asked to wait in the lobby first, and then cheer the performers on following their entrance. After all, they had been out on the streets making the performance happen. What that performance might be was anybody’s guess, but our spirits lifted when Sarah Thom, Bastian Trost, Simon Will, and Berit Stumpf entered the space, scantily clothed, and carrying video cameras. They filled the cavernous lobby with good will and more energy all at once; we were at a rock concert of sorts, but we didn’t know any of the stars. Which is one of the points of “Super Night Shot”: our stars for the evening were temporary resident aliens, the very embodiment of the unknown.

Incredibly well-directed (or managed?) by Johanna Freiburg, the collective festive atmosphere we felt in the lobby carried over to the theatre proper, and the piece itself. We were for the Gob Squad because they were adorable in their awkwardness, and their guerilla charm: they wanted to entertain us at any cost.

On the stage proper one saw a row of four screens. Each was devoted to an individual performance. The houselights dimmed, and we saw the four performers as they were an hour and a half before we took our seats. They were dressed in green Army jackets—romantic guerilla artists who, in short order, took to the streets near the Public armed with video cameras in search of love, happiness, a superhero, a bigger-than-life moment. One actor went up to various Sunday-night strollers. Wide-eyed, he asked if he could cross the street with them; another, descending the subway, asked a guy what he thought New York needed. A new mayor, new gun-control laws, and a new subway. Exactly. Over on St. Mark’s Place, Thom asked us to imagine a leading lady waiting for a kiss in the St. Mark’s Hotel, or in a flat above Sounds, the old record store. Suddenly, New York was a filthy fairy tale, filled with hope, or possibility, and a collectively innocent imagination.

And, even better than all that, we saw what the Gob Squad managed to uncover during the course of their frantic and wistful wanderings: a New York style of being that New Yorkers recognized at once, but with deep amusement, since they don’t necessarily see attributes in themselves. Almost without exception, the real-life characters captured on video had a propensity to respond to their interlocutor with humor, followed by equal parts politeness, toughness, and regret. Watching the Gob Squad in the streets, moving like flat-footed dancers through a cosmos they were unfamiliar with, thus punctuating our unfamiliarity and familiarity with the city simultaneously, we thought of what Berliners might have felt looking at the film “People on Sunday” when it was released in 1930. Was “Super Night Shot” a travelogue of our lives, too? There was the Starbucks on Astor Place, and the steel cube on Astor Square, and the falafel place on the Bowery. Where was I? Where were you? If only the Gob Squad would find us. This moving company’s silliness was touching because it was without guile. So what if they’d (potentially) flop? They’d have just as good a time getting there as they did tripping over their success.

Photograph by James Gibb.

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